Suspect Denies Knowing He Mixed Bomb

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Published: August 23, 1995

The way Federal prosecutors tell it, Fadil Abdelghani, a 33-year-old immigrant from the Sudan, was a significant element in a terrorist plot to bomb major buildings and transportation links in the New York area.

They say that on a secretly made videotape he is seen helping deliver barrels of diesel oil to a Queens "bomb factory" and then helping make a bomb by mixing the oil with fertilizer.

But Mr. Abdelghani, who is on trial with nine codefendants in Federal District Court in Manhattan, told the jury yesterday that he had simply been helping the other figures in the case without knowing the purpose of the activity other than that it involved some kind of "training."

"I said, 'What is this,' and no one answered me," Mr. Abdelghani said of the moment he began "mixing the bucket" under instructions from a man who would turn out to be an informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"I had nothing to do and I wanted to help them," the defendant replied.

Mr. Abdelghani tenaciously reiterated his explanation under a cross-examination laced with sarcasm.

"Something came over you and you had an urge to start stirring?" said Andrew C. McCarthy, one of the prosecutors in the seven-month-old trial.

"I was helping," the witness repeated, hunched forward in his seat as he stared hard at his questioner.

Mr. Abdelghani, a Jersey City resident, drove a van for a medical livery service before being arrested in the purported bomb factory in June 1993. The arrest came less than a half-hour after he helped stir the oil-and-fertilizer brew.

He is the third defendant to testify in the trial, in which 10 men are charged with pursuing aborted plots to bomb sites like the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

The prosecution says that they were motivated by opposition to United States policies in the Middle East. It argues that the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six people, was part of the overall conspiracy. None of the defendants are accused of carrying out that attack, for which four other men have already been convicted and two more await trial.

Among those now on trial is Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a militant cleric from Egypt who is accused of being the leader of the conspiracy.

The defendants generally argue that the case is trumped up, though different defendants offer different reasons as to why they are being prosecuted.

Mr. Abdelghani said he was arrested because he had gone to the wrong place at the wrong time -- a Queens garage that the F.B.I. had set up as a bomb factory and that agents were to raid on the morning he was there.

He said he had gone to the garage with his cousin, Amir Abdelgani, another Sudanese immigrant, who spells the family name slightly differently, while passing time as he waited for repairs to be made on his livery van. Amir Abdelgani is also on trial.

On the way to the Queens site, Fadil Abdelghani testified yesterday, they stopped off at two automobile service stations in Yonkers to pick up barrels of diesel fuel. Mr. Abdelghani said he asked his cousin as they left the second station, "Why do you need these barrels and oil?" He said that Amir Abdelgani responded that he was doing a favor for another man, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, who later would plead guilty to bombing-conspiracy charges in the case.

On Monday, the jury heard testimony from another defendant, Tarig Elhassan, a Sudanese immigrant who was also seen on the videotape mixing fuel oil and fertilizer.

Mr. Elhassan argued that he had been misled by the F.B.I. informer into believing he was taking part in training for the war in the former Yugoslavia.